A company called Neyrinck was showing off a de-reverberation
plug-in for Pro Tools, written by a company called Tacsystem in
Japan. It actually worked. It left behind some artifacts and
it appears to be mostly usable only for dialogue, but it
actually took out reverb below the noise floor.

This is the first someone someone has actually sold a
de-reverberation system commercially before, and if it doesn't
work perfectly (and it doesn't), it can be forgiven in the
amazement that it works at all.

This is not only the first time I have given an award to a
plug-in, this is the first time I have even mentioned a plug-in
in any show review. That's how innovative and interesting this
is. This is a tool that post production folks have wanted for
nearly a century now.

Worst Product in Show

Ecstatic Electric was showing off a wooden horn microphone. That's right, it's a conical wooden horn, about six inches in
diameter, perhaps shaped like a re-entrant paging horn speaker
but with a phasing plug and a microphone capsule. Each mike
comes with custom equalization curves to deal with some of the
horn resonances. The thing is... the demo sounded just like
listening through a paging horn, and the imaging was pretty odd
because the frequency at which the pattern goes from directional
to omnidirectional is very abrupt. I really wanted to like this
because it's clearly very well made and it's clearly unusual,
but listening to it was just too much.

Best Sound in Show

Trident Audio Developments was showing off a pair of small
nearfield monitor speakers called the HG3, and they actually
sounded good. It wasn't prone to any of the painfully obvious
issues that most small monitor designs are. Now, I've only
heard them under show floor conditions and not in a proper room,
but they definitely show enough promise that I am going to go
out and give them a listen.

Worst Sound in Show

Adam Audio did a demo of their monitor speakers which was just
unbearable to listen to. The problem is that the Adam monitors
are actually very good sounding speakers, perhaps a bit crisp on
the top but entirely usable. The 5.1 demo basically showed off
all the worst attributes, though, along with lots of sibilance
and audible lossy compression artifacts. Also the lip sync
between sound and video was off by at least two frames. I
couldn't stay there for very long before I had to leave, and
that's a shame because their product deserves better.

Loudest Sound in Show

Eventide was doing some kind of guitar pedal demos, I don't
really know the details because I wasn't willing to come
anywhere near the booth when they were going on, which was much
of the time. The poor guys at Shure were trying to demonstrate
microphones right across from them, too.

Second Loudest Sound in Show - Honorable Mention

Some honorable mention is deserved by the "Beats by Dr. Dre"
headphone demo at the Monster Cable booth. You could put the
headphones on and listen
to a lot of bass and treble and not much in-between, played at
deafeningly
loud levels. There was also a button marked "Play It Loud"
which I was afraid
to press.

Best Product Name in Show

The Oxford Inflator. I don't really know what it's supposed to
do other
than that it's software that pumps your music up.

Best Paper in Show

Rosalfonso Bortono and Wayne Kirkwood
from THAT did a short presentation called The 48 Volt Phantom
Menace
Returns. They went through all the various possible current
paths of
a typical preamp front end, showing where current travelled when
the phantom
power was turned on and off with various microphone loads, and
showed that
typical protection diodes (rail to signal line) don't actually
provide much
protection for the input transistors under a lot of conditions. They then
went to show some various methods that would work for each of
the possible
conditions. The reason this gets the award is because it
demonstrates that
some of the things that "everybody knows" about input stage
protection turn
out not actually to be true, and that's a big deal. Preprint
7909.

Worst Paper in Show

In "Simple Amplifier for Single Frequency Subwoofer," Vladimir
Filevski
uses a low pass filter and a detector to determine the
instantaneous level
of low frequency information in a signal, and uses that control
voltage
to modulate the 50 or 60 Hz AC power line and apply it to a
subwoofer.
It replaces whatever bass content is in the signal with a single
frequency
thump. As someone who loves string bass and who thinks accurate
bass is
one of the most important attributes of a proper sound system, I
cannot say
how unspeakable I think this is, but I will say that this sort
of thing is
the logical extreme of the whole thumping bandpass enclosure
subwoofer craze.
That craze is bad because it's leading a whole generation of
kids to think
that this is all there is in the lower register. Preprint 7839
is available
if you want to see it.

Best Free Stuff

Millennia Media was giving out nice velcro cable ties. Now, a
number of
companies were giving out cable ties, but these were really nice
ones that
will last a long time. When you give out candies, people eat
them and
then they are gone. When you give out little kitchy things,
people break
them and then they are gone. You give out a cable tie and
people use them,
and they keep using them, and then twenty years later they're
still using
them and they still think of your company when they see them. That's a
big deal. I got a lot of free things at the show, but the cable
ties are
something that will actually make my life better. Not like the
pocketknife
I got a few years ago, which broke and injured me the first time
I used it.

Special Award for Most Hype

For the past three weeks, people have been calling me and asking
me if I
know about this vapour microphone. It's been in all the popular
press, and
even the AP newswire has had a special on it. I don't know what
publicity
organization these guys hired but they sure have been effective.

The item itself is a microphone that operates by using a laser
to measure the
density of a column of smoke. It has a fairly high noise floor,
because smoke
consists of moving particles. The demonstration itself was
amusing but did
not make it seem practical. As an engineer from a large
European microphone
manufacturer said, "It looks a lot like those pipes you see in
Amsterdam and
you talk into an opening and distortion comes out."

Schwartz Engineering developed and patented it, and they claim
falsely that
it's the "first laser microphone." It's certainly the first
microphone using
a laser to measure aggregate particle density, though that's not
really a
practical sound measurement method.

Still, it was an interesting demo and would have been worthwhile
down in the
paper sessions, but the vast amount of hype around it just
dwarfed any actual
interesting technology it may have had. Even the press package
that they
handed out on CD contained press releases that were so over the
top that they
were almost laughable. (And they were also proprietary
Microsoft .doc files.)